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As far as I know, this results from allowing a producer to produce 100% fossil fuel energy and buy certificates to "convert" that into 100% renewable.

It's an artifact of stuff like carbon credits. Companies like apple, google, and amazon declare that they are carbon neutral, or will be by some date, and what they actually do is burn a lot of fossil fuel but "offset" it by paying for carbon credits.

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Exactly. That’s the core problem the Index exposes. Under current UK rules (and indeed in most countries), suppliers can legally call their power “100% renewable” even when it’s mostly gas at times of low renewable generation. They can do this by offsetting the non-renewable deficit with certificates from sunny summer hours.

What we've tried to do at Matched is make this fact visible, showing which suppliers actually deliver clean power hour by hour rather than just on paper. A number of suppliers (notably Good Energy and Octopus) perform surprisingly well, be procuring renewable power that aligns well with their consumer's demand.

Not just burn fossil fuel: They also take some of the money from the credit sale and fund renewable energy production projects, and those will pay back the credit at a future date. (That’s the theory in very broad strokes, as I understand it. Whether that is what actually happens I don’t know.)

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